


your body that can't love you, and your will that can't save you

by thewritingnaturalist



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy, Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (TV 2016)
Genre: And Andrei is...Andrei, And potentially triggering body thoughts, Blood and Injury, But Natasha is a light in the darkness as always, But if I missed something definitely leave a comment!, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I think that's all the trigger warnings, I tried to keep it not super graphic but there is Definitely Blood, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Internalized Fatphobia, Major Character Injury, Mostly hurt, Pierre is self-hating as usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28231509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewritingnaturalist/pseuds/thewritingnaturalist
Summary: 1812. Pierre takes one painful step after another in the snow-choked wastes outside Moscow. Andrei wrestles with Death in a narrow wooden bed. Natasha prays, in vain, for both of them.
Relationships: Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky/Natalya "Natasha" Ilyinichna Rostova, Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov & Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov/Natalya "Natasha" Ilyinichna Rostova
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	your body that can't love you, and your will that can't save you

**Author's Note:**

> TW for internalized fatphobia (including some potentially triggering descriptions), and for the usual blood/guts/warfare themes that one expects from the War and Peace fandom. Also, fair warning, I haven't gotten to this part in the book yet, so there's a good chance this lines up with BBC 2016 canon much better than it does with book canon.
> 
> (Based on a prompt by @gaslightgallows, which was in turn based on a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.)

_Then, suddenly, you’re left all alone_

_With your body that can’t love you._

In his quiet way, Pierre had always hated his body. 

It lumbered into his nightmares as something shambling, monstrous. It sucked up all the air in the room. It intruded, fat and flabby and almost beyond his control, on the intimate joys of others: Helene and Dolokhov, Natasha and Andrei. 

More than once, on one of those endless nights when Helene, glittering and diaphanous in her most beautiful gown, had not come home ( _she deserves to be happy_ , he told himself), he had walked barefoot and naked to the mirror, and stood in front of it until the chill of the flagstones crept up his legs, and pinched his nails into his dimpled flesh until it bled ( _she deserves better than this,_ he told himself, _better than you_ ).

On the road out of Moscow, Pierre found, to his surprise, that his body was both everything and nothing to him. He was aware of its smallest movement: the stickiness of bloody feet on snow, the groaning of muscles as they scraped jerkily together and apart. But when the prisoners were allowed the rare chance to wash, he stripped down without bothering to hide the flabbiness of his stomach and thighs.

What did it matter, now? Helene was gone (and Pierre sensed, although he knew nothing of the delicate cruelties of pills and blood, that he would never see her again). Andrei was gone. Natasha was gone. Unmoored from everyone that he had never measured up to, Pierre found that he was nothing more or less than human: a fleshy skeleton, impelled by terrible desire to put one foot in front of the other. 

The image made him smile. He tried to express it to Karataev, but his lips stumbled numbly over the words, and Karataev ** _—_** flushed with fever and hazy as a drunkard ** _—_** might not have understood him anyway.

They staggered on. The relentless wind carved his fellow prisoners down to the bone, chipping away at them piece by piece. Pierre, unaccountably, stayed soft. His body trembled, and froze, and cracked, and did not break. And when he heard the _thunk_ of bullets in flesh for the third time in his life, he dove under a wagon and sheltered his head between his plump arms.

 _My God_ , he thought, gasping over the heartbeat that shook him from head to toe. _I want to live_.

* * *

_And your will that can’t save you._

Andrei had always prided himself, above all else, on his willpower. Where Mary bent like a birch sapling before the gusts of their father’s anger, he stood like an oak: fracturing, splintering, growing new and stronger wood over his scars. 

Now, he lay in his narrow cot and willed his hand to grasp the water glass by his bedside. Breath whistled through his lungs. Blood seeped through his nightshirt. His hand trembled, and did not move.

“Natasha.” As always, she intuited what he wanted and held the water to his lips. It slid down his throat, cool, soothing. He wondered if it would reappear in a moment, leaking out of the gory mess that used to be his stomach. “Thank you.”

She gave him the ghost of a smile, half-fond, half-reproachful. “Stop thanking me.”

“Thank you.”

“Stubborn donkey.”

He was ** _—_** had always been ** _—_** stubborn. Stubborn enough to march across blood-slicked grass, to look a bomb in the face and not step away. Stubborn enough to hold onto his friendship with Pierre, against all odds. Dear Pierre. Natasha had said he was safe, and in Moscow. Andrei suspected she was lying, but he didn’t quite have the strength to ask her. Let Pierre be well, and warm, and happy, Andrei thought, in his own mind at least.

Natasha walked to the window. Waved to someone outside. As always, when he saw her like this ** _—_** disheveled, unexpected, with a light in her eyes ** _—_** Andrei had to choke down the astonishment that he had ever asked her to marry him. The audacity he must have had, to see an angel across a ballroom, someone that God would strike him down for looking at twice, and take her fragility in his calloused palms and ask her to dance.

But Natasha was not fragile, Andrei knew now, for all that he had been too stubborn to forgive her ** _—_** or not stubborn enough to fight for her ** _—_** or…

His thoughts were slipping, he realized. The room tilted. He willed himself to breathe. _In. Out. In. Out._

Natasha was back at his bedside. “Andrei,” she whispered.

He stretched out his hand to her, and felt a little more control slip between his trembling fingers. She took them in hers. She was very warm, he thought. Or perhaps he was very cold. 

“Oh, God.” Natasha got to her feet in a blur of motion. Andrei blinked up at her. He followed her gaze down ** _—_** ah. There was blood pooled on the blanket. The wound must have reopened again.

Natasha fumbled at his bandages. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry,” and put pressure on the wound with all the crushing, fiery weight she could muster.

Andrei closed his eyes. As a boy, his father had forced him to memorize page after page of human anatomy. He could picture it all now: The spinal column tracing down, through the ribs, through the pelvis. The delicate nerves and muscles of the eyes, reflecting the sky right side up and upside down and blue and endless...

 _No. Don’t think about the sky._ Andrei gripped the sheet and forced himself to hold his ribcage together, pumping blood in and out with every measured breath.

* * *

_But now, like a whispering in dark streets,_

_Rumors of God run through your dark blood._

Andrei’s blood was still drying on her hands, black and profane, when Natasha knelt to pray. 

She prayed for Pierre’s body, that somewhere he was slumped improbably in front of a fire, pushing his glasses up his nose, turning pages with soft hands. She prayed for Andrei’s will, for the determined way he gasped for breath in his sleep beneath blood-soaked sheets.

Mostly, she prayed for herself. She could see God behind Andrei’s eyes now, when the early morning light streamed through the window. She had always seen Him lurking in the shadows of Pierre’s spectacles. 

When she got up off her knees and held a candle up to the mirror above the dresser, she saw nothing behind her own eyes. They were just eyes: red, and tired, and joyful, and desperate.

The snow fell outside the window. Natasha hummed to herself: a waltz, something from Moscow, from the old days. She’d probably tried to teach Pierre. He’d probably made a fool of himself, to please her. And Andrei had probably done it beautifully. He had always done everything beautifully, she thought, even dying...

As the moonlight fell across his pillow, Andrei stirred. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

“I’m dancing,” said Natasha.

  
  



End file.
